‘The Space Between (beneath and beyond)’ grew from conversations with artists Jemma Grundon and Jessica Bartlett to accompany the exhibition ‘The Space Between’. Reflecting its experimental ethos, words are allowed to weave spidery webs of silvery thread, sewing seams, casting shadows and making gestures beyond the gallery walls. The present is given a past / future and memories are materialised and spoken, smudging the surface as they unravel to say ‘I remember’[i].

“But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there
And nothing can exist except what’s there.”[ii]

On surface…Through light and shadow emerges a paradoxical urge for an impermanent permanence – a fleeting moment fossilised, a cloud captured, a leaf pressed between two pages and a tree reflected in its own reflection… acts of containment creating their own ‘space between’, hovering above and below the surface, lingering inside and out, pushing upwards and outwards. Surfaces expand, layer-upon-layer in oil and resin, or lie excavated, pulled apart with heat and metal… Memories litter the surface, tiny traces of aura, scattered but no less sacred. Memories of materiality, memories of objects lost and found and memories of a moment… The need to hold and harbour hangs in the air like a savoured morsel wrapped in linen; a photograph tucked between dusty pages; a lock of childhood hair that slithers from a ribbon’s silken grip… Memories litter the surface. Each mark, each line, each layer a trace. Even these words memorialise, dotting the page like headstones… ‘I remember’…

On space…The space between is a bridgeable void, it is fecund ground, an interval or a lingering pause, a release of breath, both time and place; heterotopian, a break between words, a mutable boundary, a porous surface (for ‘everything is surface’), simultaneous, a collision, a transition, transformative, mobile and multifarious, possibilities exist and memories are retrieved and remembered.

…space hangs between works, between visibility and nothingness, between fragility and solidity, absence and presence, the constant search to ‘capture a moment in time’. To hold and harbour, savouring each morsel…

…and there is space within. Space within glass, space within paint, within layers and scratches, molten marks and skeletal tendrils… space to shelter or hide away, space to float, hover and linger

clouds-floating-feathers, burnt leaves lifting gently pulling at burnt burrs like a scab, a landscape half-remembered, and words that seep like water through the cracks and fissures. ‘I remember’.

On visibility… The light catches a burred edge, curled and gently peeling back upon itself like a chrysalis ready to hatch. Molten lines remember a leaf, now pressed between the pages of a book. Moving in and out of visibility, shadows reveal scarred and sculptured surfaces… Shifting between absence and presence, from one moment to the next, resisting capture, refuting reproduction, hovering between visibility and the invisible…. are they there?

…a reflection of reflections. The trees are waving at their shadows before disappearing out of view. Obscured by acid they float in milky puddles, splintered into a thousand traces beneath the surface… Landscapes emerge from papery beginnings; cross-hatched, annotated and torn to view. Miniature ‘skips become redundant, enfolded within other memories as translucent layers build in obscurity. A painting is found and then lost. The landscape within never existed, except when it once did. The smoothen surface soothes whispering ‘I remember’…

On liminality… And a veil falls like silence, trapping a cloud within its wake.

Somewhere between lost and found… a hole is torn in the sky where the rain falls-in, dancing with sunlight that casts a silvered glow. Light falls between the layers, trapped between two worlds, between surface and the memory of surface, and the memory of a photograph within which at least a fragment of this sky once lived. Like twilight the sky hangs, hovers and falters – in between space – in a space between, held in a glassy hand, miniaturized and hermetically sealed, the latch has dissolved…

Elsewhere a leaf floats out of frame, spilling over, jostling for space, forgetting its manners to rest and nestle at the edge… It is only a memory… someone else’s memory sent across continents to rest-pressed within the pages of a book… someone else’s memories of stifling heat and sun-buried days.

A book of memories, a space between, times and places that don’t belong to its owner, captured… and far-off a window opens, a breeze beckons tugging at the edges, lifting gently at the frayed paint.

On collecting… an empty hollow still exists within her pocket, a stony memory, hot- hand, clenched-fist, precious treasures. Beyond (years later) lies a feather. Marked with dappled spots and tiger stripes, wavering and calligraphic like the grey-black wash of a Japanese ink drawing. Treasure that belongs to something bigger; a wing, a bird, a branch, a tree, remnants, ruins, little castles…so that she can remember.

On memory…memories are souvenirs, moments in time, an empty acorn shell lodged within the crevices of a well-worn coat. A leaf sent across seas and years, passed from hand-to-hand, a photograph of a path through pines lined with beaten bracken and the creaking carpet of a forest-floor trampled underfoot. A cloud hovering on a blue-sky day, a candy-floss container of wispy edges and tails…

Memories are landscapes that never really existed, a bricolage of imaginings… Memories are threads melted into paint to trace the outlines of a twig, so easily unraveled, or the ghostly arms of a waving tree caught both upon and within and beyond the surface, or glimpsed through a windowpane…

Memories are brittle, dried leaves ready to disintegrate

Memories are stories and full stops, vessels of permanence that dip and dive above and below the surface. They are solid as a board or a pane of glass, painted, etched, then washed away with layers that dissolve and obscure. They are traces, auras, shadows and reflections, resisting capture, ‘memory-images’[iv] scooping up each line and landscape – impossible to photograph – an impermanent resistance.

They are clouds, leaves and trees, they are the spaces between (beneath and beyond), they are surface (for ‘everything is surface’).

Artist profile for Serena Curmi whose work can be seen here. The text can also be downloaded as a PDF here Half the Truth

Half the Truth

Curmi’s paintings only ever tell us half the truth. Cloaked figures – predominantly female –emerge from the mist or dissipate, reminiscent of raindrops in a cloud. Gazing outwards their melancholic faces peer into the endless distance, subdued and suspended in time.

Amidst the stillness lingers a pervading sense of anticipation, or perhaps it is expectation, steady and unwavering. Here these sombre creatures remain, cast upon the canvas like shadows, caught between twilight and daybreak.

For those so still, it is strange that movement features quite so prominently in Curmi’s titles, whether they are physical journeys Coming Home, Touching Down, The Higher you Climb, or philosophical transitions Moving On, Misplaced and Departure. They are suggestive and rich in narrative, imbuing the work with a literary after-life, perhaps the result of an imagination originally realised through illustration.

But these figures don’t have voices. The works are silent. Characters blow through them like tumbleweed, dry and diasporic, detached from their earthly roots. Or if they do speak it is in whispers, ghostly utterings, caught in a dusty cobweb. Shhh.

Curmi’s characters are not ‘characters’ in the usual sense. Almost without exception her work features either the wisened faces of old men (their facades faded with time) or young women with a sad yet youthful pallor. Seen as a body of work they create a gendered timeline, polarities embalmed in pigment. Familiar features reappear throughout the work, blowing in and out so that you begin to wonder if they have indeed been ‘misplaced’.

But if so, where did they come from and where will they go? There are no buildings, nor indeed landscapes or locales, with which to tether their tale. There is nowhere to hide.

Occasionally an interloper stops by, calling at a withered hem or resting on an outstretched hand. If Curmi’s figures lack stability these animal vagrants are yet more fragile, delicately clinging to the canvas as if one small breath were all it took to loosen their grip.

For where paint historically conceals – stratified as if to hide – there is a delicacy about Curmi’s work that transcends the medium. Oil is dried out, thinned and applied like a shallow wash so that it either floats above the surface or bleeds into the background. Often described as uncluttered or minimalist, this does not do justice to the immense potential of these empty backdrops. Laced with nostalgia colours smudge and fade. Nebulous as a cloud they are heavy with promise, wistful and faltering, littered with half-told tales, half-truths. Words unspoken, songs unsung.

Imagined Landscapes presents the work of a multidisciplinary group of contemporary artists, featuring transitional topographies, ancient sites and appropriated spaces. It suggests that the role of the artist is also that of storyteller, cartographer and cultural geographer. However, putting disciplines aside, if landscape provides us with “a way of seeing, a way of thinking about the physical land”[1] what then does it mean to ‘imagine’ a landscape?

In Imagined Landscapes the answer to this lies in a number of responses conveyed through a variety of media. Here, landscapes are remembered (looking back) and imagined (looking forward), then re-imagined, mapped and collaged back together. Places are charted, catalogued and ordered; emptiness explored and colonised. Traces, marks and pathways materialised. The landscape is resurrected through stone and chalk. Boundaries are drawn, spaces narrated and histories revealed.

But whose history is it? Imagined Landscapes makes reference to a number of different places and spaces, creating a contrasting perception of landscape to that experienced through the very specific locale explored in Inquisitive Eyes: Slade Painters in Edwardian Wessex, seen in the adjoining galleries. Yet it is worth remembering that the Wessex in this title is also an imagined place – a literary landscape which shifts and mutates to allow room for new narratives, characters and twists in plot, including Inquisitive Eyes’ own ‘lost chapter in British art’.

As a geographical region, Wessex most closely mirrors our contemporary concept of the South West, stretching from Wiltshire in the east to Cornwall in the west and fleeting north on occasion to encompass the urbanity of Bristol. In contrast, Imagined Landscapes moves across the British Isles, from north to south, beyond barrow and bluff, to headland and edge-land. However, the importance of place is still paramount for many of the artists represented – even more so than a concern for landscape itself.

Scottish artist Eileen Lawrence RSA for example does not see her work as being ‘about’ landscape. Instead her interest lies in “marking, recording or capturing a sense of having been there.”[2] But where is there? The works in the exhibition are titled Monadhliath Mountains, referring to a range in the Scottish Highlands, also known as ‘The Grey Hills’. Lawrence writes by way of accompaniment to the work: “It has been dark for some time now. I am standing on the Caithness flagstones outside my house. The dark night sky holds the even darker shapes of the surrounding trees, Norway Spruce, Sitka Spruce and Lodgepole Pine. The first owl call comes from within the woods to the east of where I stand, a few moments later and another owl calls from the more distant direction of the Monadhliath Mountains that stretch southwest from here.”[3]

The specificity to which this passage alludes is not however evoked through the pristine camera lens or laboured in paint, but instead is conveyed through the tactility suggested by the use of natural materials, which in Monadhliath Mountains includes feathers collaged upon the paper’s surface. Lawrence’s practice involves the collation of materials from within the landscape, returning with them to her studio. Here they are ordered and catalogued, creating a collection of ‘traces’.

With interests ranging from ancient architecture, mythology and ancestral history, one can see how these objects begin to represent not just ‘the’ landscape from which Lawrence has extracted them, but the strata of landscape stretching back over centuries. Specificity of place therefore becomes blended with something more fluid to create a “form of visual poetry”[4]. This rather romantic reading of the work chimes with the approach of landscape historian William Hoskins who suggested that “poets make the best topographers.”[5]

This relationship between poetry and topography or in fact and fiction weaves its way throughout Imagined Landscapes. It can be encountered between works, such as the stark contrast of Jem Southam’s large-format photographic series The Pond at Upton Pyne, which faithfully documents the same changing locale over a number of years, and Stephen Felmingham’s discursive landscape Ida and Dactyl – rendered in charcoal so that even its material is inherently fragile.

And it can also be seen within works, such as Paul Gough’s ‘edgelands’ which find their inspiration in the genius loci (spirit of place) – a notion commonly associated with the artist Paul Nash for whom Gough looks to for inspiration – yet from here expands to create overlapping narratives incorporating multiple sites, memories and places.

Another interesting iteration of this tension lies within the intrinsic factuality of cartography, a practice explored by a number of artists in the exhibition. Maps suggest the concretisation of knowledge. They provide us with a way in which to negotiate the landscape, creating borders and boundaries. Topographically their purpose is to describe with accuracy: to ‘make known’ particular places. However, they also create pathways and spaces between.

Iain Biggs’ work uses the process of deep mapping to interweave various disciplines and practices together. By finding the middle ground he creates what he refers to as a ‘conversational space’ suggesting an alternative use for mapping that deflects its traditional tendency towards separation.[6] His work Severn Waterscape (for Owain Jones) is an example of this weaving technique. Its unframed, wall-based presentation shares a history with the hanging maps produced by 17th century Dutch cartographers, which were hung alongside landscape paintings.[7] Its layering of different source materials creates multiple readings, in essence ‘imagining’ a new landscape out of many.

This idea of assemblage and appropriation shares similarities with Rae Hicks’ approach to the construction of landscape within his brightly coloured abstractions. City Slickers was made after looking at the work of British artist John Piper. Inspired by the flatness of Piper’s buildings, Hicks set out to create a ‘fake landscape’ with shape and form reflecting the redevelopment architecture of London. In other works he plays with Western landscape traditions, dislocating natural forms from their beginnings.

Also existing somewhere between the real and the imagined is the work of Gill Rocca, who appropriates existing imagery to create liminal landscapes that rely on the notion of anonymity to draw us in. We are not meant to ‘place’ these landscapes. They are deliberately ambiguous in their origin. Imagined Landscapes contains a number of Rocca’s miniatures and smaller works from various series aptly titled Nowhere and Elsewhere (other series not in the show include Somewhere Here and Somewhere In Between). They are imagined landscapes in as much that they are a combination of references, causing one to wonder where is Nowhere?

Rocca borrows references from photography and film to create the starting point for her work, creating images that are both filmic and familiar. In most of the works a road winds off into the distance leaving an expanse of empty space in the centre of the image upon which we can project our own memories and narrative. Displayed as a group they also create spaces between, moments of stillness within which to rest and re-imagine.

The notion of stillness and movement within the landscape, or to put it another way stability and fragility, is also addressed in Imagined Landscapes through a number of works that engage with environmental issues. More specifically, for the most part, coastal and inland flooding, imbuing traditionally dry landscapes with a waterlogged history.

Bristol based multi-disciplinary artists Jethro Brice and Seila Fernández Arconada have adapted the community based art project Some:when for this exhibition by projecting images of the landscape, and the community which inhabit it, onto the interior surface of a traditional Somerset Flatner. The boat was handmade as part of the project which sought to reflect the ingenuity of the community at Langport in dealing with the devastating flooding which hit the area in 2013-14. In the gallery context a vessel used for traversing the landscape becomes a backdrop for the landscape itself, creating a static canvas upon which to tell this story of change.

Similarly Veronica Vickery’s work Poniou25/5 considers the effect of coastal flooding, moving the focus to a stream in West Cornwall. The work has been revisited since it was last shown so that rather than a series of canvases snaking across the wall it is now cantilevered across a steel structure. Whereas previously the work reinforced the swollen waterway as a boundary, it now creates a transparent border with its grid like structure allowing for multiple viewpoints through and between the work. In much the same way that Biggs’ work alludes to the conversational capacity of borders in mapping, the physical display of Poniou creates conversations between other works within the exhibition whilst still physically dividing the space.

This materiality is an important concern, one that returns us to the notion of place. Perhaps commanding the largest physical presence in the exhibition are Tim Harrisson’s monolithic stone sculptures, carved from sedimentary stone aged between 100 to 200 million year’s old. Each derives from a specific location, imbedded with an affiliation to place. In their solidity and the organic nature of their forms they seem to embody the notion of time and place. The intimacy of their textured, tactile surfaces contain both myth and memory – much like we imagine that the light touch of a feather in Lawrence’s Monadhliath Mountains might transport us back to her doorstep in the darkness of night.

The interweaving relationships between memory and imagination, place and space, and materiality and content within the landscape evokes the question “If a place is defined by memory, but no one with memories is left to bring them to the surface, does a place become a no place?”[8] The artists within Imagined landscapes all deal with memory in some way (whether that be their own or that of someone else). We could just as soon ask what does it mean to ‘remember’ a landscape as to ‘imagine’ it, yet perhaps the answer would be a combination of both, of looking back and looking forward, of ‘having been there’ – wherever there might be.

A response to the photographic series Other Human, a work by Suze Eyles, 2015, which can be seen here. The text can also be downloaded as a PDF here Other Human – A Response

Other Human

“I’m so very tired of being all alone here.”[1]Alone amongst the shadows. Caught between the faded floral bloom and folds of dirty net. Lost within the spiralling swirls of papered walls, whirling like a Waltzer.

Photographer Suze Eyles’ poignant photographic essay, Other Human, is presented as both a series of individually framed and aluminium-mounted prints, and, as an accompanying monochromatic and multi-layered publication.

Eyles’ intimate series enters the world of Andy, a friend diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder – a condition that we are only made aware of through the accompanying text.[2] Quasi-portraits are shot on a small digital handheld Leica, domestic in size like the interiors upon which the work reflects. The series documents the ‘rhythm and routine’ of Andy’s daily life at home, creating an added layer of voyeuristic vulnerability to that which comes from being ‘looked at’.

The suggestion here is that we have been invited in: into a life, in amongst the domestic debris of soiled sinks and the fraying edges of an armchair’s woven throw. Into an-other’s world.

In one image a trailing wire traverses the wall – an electrical vine held in place by the aging tackiness of mottled tape. Perhaps what it is really holding in place are the vestiges of normality, maintaining communication with a world beyond these walls. In another, a key hangs starkly on a lone hook as a clock steadily tick-tocks in the corner counting time – in the stillness of these images we wonder just how much time has passed.

It is these faded edges of a life that Eyles’ latches onto. Traces and shadows that simultaneously intimate and eviscerate. In a number of images the focus falls on brightly lit hands, yet we never clearly see Andy’s face. It was Eyles’ decision to add this layer of anonymity, which also provides a subtle acknowledgement of the day-to-day difficulty autism presents in reading facial expressions.

Instead images are defined by shape and shade. Andy’s identity can only be glimpsed at through the fabric folds of a sleeve, a bent head, or the protective posture of hunched shoulders. We search for clues amongst the plastic paraphernalia of canine companions, the saccharine decoration on a china mug or the imprint of a body in the sunken seat of an armchair – creases waiting to be shaken out.

“I’m so very tired of being all alone here.” We too are alone. Alone and lost within each image, feeling amongst the grainy filters. As photographs they are hard to read: softly focused and colonized by darkness and shadow. In the accompanying book the matt-paper soaks and submerges the light so that it is hard to see beyond the emptiness and dated drudgery of domesticity. Texture too is important. The wall’s papery sheen, the dense shag underfoot, even the grit-ridden tidemarks and dirty rings that mark the stainless steel sink absorb and engross, enveloping and enfolding our gaze, pulling us inwards amongst the gloom.

Yet they are images only half-known. They pull us in and then turn us away, deliberately holding us at arm’s length. It is often upon the fringes of each image that our attention is focused: a dog-gazing outward past the photographic frame or the contents of a room that lies beyond a half-crooked door. They create a feeling of separation, a liminal gulley that lies between, impossible to cross. We cannot see in, yet neither can Andy see out. As if a grubby sleeve has been smeared across a windowpane, leaving a smudgy film. “I am inside my world. A world like no other.”[3]

This lack of ‘focus’, both formally and technically, makes the viewer work harder. There is empathy to be found amongst the emptiness, and the lingering ‘lack’ of subject helps to reinforce this. The suggestion being that as we struggle to ‘read’ each image we are physically re-enacting Andy’s struggle in daily life to communicate beyond this world.

The anonymity of Eyles’ subject also suggests a broader aim to the project. It is not just Andy’s world that we are peering into, but that of others or ‘other’: “So although it is put forward as a portrait it is not the portrait of one, but in essence a portrait of many persons.”[4] Andy’s ‘absence’ leaves room for others to occupy the space. So too do the gaps within and between each image. The resulting intrigue of Other Human is perhaps a result of this space.

Eyles’ approach to photography remains strongly wedded to the notion of a collaborative space in which photographer, subject and viewer play equal parts. It is a method as intimate as Other Humans theme. And here, presented as two parts of a whole – book and print – this co-dependent relationship is reinforced. Containing both word and image it is tactile, textural and inter-textual.

Within the book words appear as fragments intimately interwoven between each image. These ‘borrowed words’ are selected almost entirely from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carrolls’ classic tale of misadventure. The ‘wonderland’ for Alice is both magical and chaotic, a place where language often fails to communicate. The fact that these words are neither Andy’s nor Eyles’ is in this instance particularly apt, allowing each text to standalone, signposting neither east nor west.

If the combination of word and image brings multiplicitous meaning to our experience of Other Human then the physical intimacy of the book itself is also relevant. It can be touched, held and enveloped. The act of cradling it between our own hands draws us back to Andy’s hands. We/he is still alone, but perhaps now not quite so other.

Exhibition essay to accompany the show Peter Randall-Page RA RWA and Kate MccGwire, at RWA, 2015. The essay can also be downloaded as a PDF here Of Feather and Stone.

These are the ancient and the modern: upturned stone carved and hollowed, feathered limbs emerging, writhing from the fecund fen. Inside and out, excavated, subtracted, miniaturised and expanded. Suffocated, unleashed, clamped, grasped, squeezed and squeezing. The past patterned upon them, imbedded and fossilised. Time lingers upon the surface, slipping, sliding below and resurfacing. Nature’s ebb and flow, or the inevitable “dance between geometry and organism”1.

Part One: Upon the horizon rose a flock of birds, moving as one.
Since 2005, when Kate MccGwire moved her studio to a Dutch barge on the River Thames, feathers have been her prime source of material. Inspired by the surrounding wildlife of her habitat, her work has developed an underlying thread. Yet this ornithological flight is not a new relationship. Its roots go deeper, entangled in childhood and entwined with a history of place. Growing up on the Norfolk Broads, birds have been with MccGwire from ‘dawn till dusk’. Their migratory patterns are imbedded in memory and the cultural connotations of particular species inform the meaning of her work.

An equally prevalent motif is that of water. There is a recurring slippage within MccGwire’s coiled works which mirrors the ebb and flow of the ‘liquid landscape’ of her childhood: a place where ancient inshore currents threaten the reclaimed land. The word itself – liquid – oozes with meaning, rich and viscous, its syllables seeping together. It is these inky blue-black waters which gurgled below the fertile surface of the soil that inspire and infiltrate her work: “It is strange – or perhaps not strange, not strange at all, only logical that the bare and empty fens yield so readily to the imaginary and the supernatural.”2

The movement of water and the movement of birds lend themselves well to a discussion of MccGwire’s work. Just as water droplets join to form a constantly moving and mutating mass, so too does a flock of birds caught mid-flight in murmuration. Here, flying close to the ground then soaring upwards each bird remains equidistant to one another based on the span of their wings. Although the density remains the same throughout, the centre never stabilises. And neither do MccGwire’s larger serpentine sculptures. Even confined they are suggestive of movement.

This is in part due to the relationship between surface and that which is submerged, the formalism of what lies above and below. But it is also a result of their material duality. Feathers possess both strength and fragility. Their use and purpose is multiple: including flight, insulation, waterproofing, communication and protection3. However, unlike the exotic ornamental plumage from the popular 18th century paradiseaeidae (bird pf paradise), MccGwire favours the indigenous markings of British birds, embracing the blue-black of the Crow and the shining iridescence of the common Mallard. Illuminated in daylight these humble feathers are transformed so that even when the viewer stands still, microscopic changes in the sun’s rays transform each plume travelling through the underbelly of the rainbow from green to blue to black to brown.

MccGwire treats these precious materials with incessant care, defined by a deeply entrenched respect for the natural world. Her feathers are cherished: collected, preserved and conserved. Just as a bird sheds its coat each year, creating a bountiful harvest, MccGwire too works in volume. The ‘making’ process is hugely physical with pieces sometimes taking months to construct and often requiring the artist to distort and contort herself into unnatural positions. Her work often flows from drawings where shapes come alive, winding their way about the page. Sometimes these are finished works such as the labyrinth of worm-like coils burrowing their way in graphite across the paper as in Intest. Often though they are simply ideas that hatch then mutate before becoming realised in their three-dimensional form.

The visceral physicality of MccGwire’s sculpture lends itself to a phenomenological response, as it stands before, above or below us, looking in, out, through and beyond. Her work, which is conceived within the narrow confines of her studio, changes perceptibly with each new environment as the space around it contracts or expands, pulling and pushing the work in different directions.

As a viewer our relationship with both site and sculpture changes too as our movement around the work is subtly shifted by the gallery’s architecture, creating new perspectives in space. With their sinuous form and limb-like proportions MccGwire’s sculpture’s often force an uncomfortable act of recognition: “as a body which takes up part of the same space.”4 Here, Flail, in particular, knotted and twisted and locked away, provokes a strong bodily response, tying its own metaphorical knots tight around our torso. Pushing out-and-in and between, entangled without any hope of yielding to the touch. References to the marble sinew of Laocoön5 are not lost.

If Flail appeals to our corporal consciousness, then Gyre achieves a sublime monstrousness, suspended between beauty and the grotesque. It emerges from-and-through the flat linearity of the gallery wall. Thrusting, writhing, both repellent and compelling – ‘for they are still trying to straighten out the slithering, wriggly, eel like Ooze.’6 It twists and turns wrapping round, round and around itself, mimicking the macabre ribbons of an underwater maypole, playful yet treacherous. A velveteen coat of feathers catches the light as our gaze is absorbed, blackened, pulled between its folds and held.

These hybrid creatures blur the lines between man and beast. Or rather the human body ‘but it’s not the human body.’7 In Gyre we are confronted with an-‘other’. There is recognition and revulsion, familiarity and fear. Weaving and winding surreptitiously along the gallery floor – like an eel snaking along the riverbed8 – it makes us wary of its serpentine hold. And what of ‘to hold’? MccGwire’s sculptures are inherently tactual. From the preening that takes place as part of the process of ‘making’ they beseech us with their tactility. Stroke me.

In sharp contrast MccGwire’s glass encased sculptures reject our touch, perfectly poised and cocooned in glass. She has suggested that her work explores the notion of the ‘unseen being brought to the surface.’9 Here, the surface is two-fold; a feathered coat and transparent cloche. MccGwire chooses the cases first then constructs the work to go inside them, ensuring a suffocating and claustrophobic proximity between sculpture and shroud. Viewing the work is akin to a type of zoological voyeurism, peering through the glass our gaze is reflected and deferred, softened and safeguarded.

There is also something of the fetish here, not just in the winding gyration of shape and form but in the feathers themselves. As an objet d’art they have been likened to fur and velvet and thus equated with Freud’s notion of fetishism.10 Yet, MccGwire’s sculpture skirts these connotations staking its claim forcefully in the natural world. Through mimicking the organic patterns found in nature her work supersedes the merely fetishistic or decorative to rest, hauntingly, at a point between familiarity and fantasy.

Part Two: A ‘dance between geometry and organism’.11
As a child Peter Randall-Page was a collector. Stones, seeds, leaves and fossils: nature’s treasure cradled in small hands and pocketed for safekeeping. Imagine a sturdy shelf leaden with bounty where the miniature perfection of an acorn cup sits side-by-side with the split husk of a walnut – prized possessions that would later form the inspiration for a lifetime of work.

Play is important to Randall-Page, and now, lined-up in the gallery, his sculpture makes direct reference to those shapes and forms collected in infancy. The past too is important in as much that his work possesses a sense of timelessness. Size and material may have differed but essentially he is still ‘playing’ with the same patterns and structures he explored as a child.

Occupying a space between play and order Randall-Page’s work is also rooted in science as he dances the thin line between the objectivity of a mathematician and the subjectivity of an artist, or in his own words ‘the known and the ambiguous’12. As his work has developed, the notion of metaphor has become more redolent, and in his large-scale ink drawings the idea of ‘a reminder of something else’ takes on multiple possibilities. Splaying out and upwards, defying gravity, tipped and tilted so as to owe as much to chance as to plan, these watery tributaries evoke memories of tree roots, river deltas and vascular networks.

The ‘memories’ that Randall-Page’s work provokes find their formation in the natural world, offering up variations of the same theme. He has often referred to ‘nature’s blueprint’13 as a guiding force in his work, furnishing him with the rules from which to deviate. In Theme and Variation, a series of bronze sculptures, this idea is played out to fruition. The bulbous shape of naturally eroded boulders has been cast in fibreglass to which thousands of spherical ping pong balls have then been added. From here the work is cast in bronze and finished with a dense black patina, polished to perfection and covered in shining nodules. These protuberances are part of a textured outer skin, imperfectly spiralling around the amorphous form. Their outer appearance is that of a rather docile sea anemone, edges smoothed and removed of its sting, or the firm skin of an engorged bread fruit.

They too entice a sense of touch. In their uniformed texture there is a dual sense of the unknown and familiarity. One imagines that to run the smooth palm of an outstretched hand across the surface would proffer up a simple form of communication or narrative – a sculptural vocabulary – through which we are helped to understand the world. Similar to that, perhaps, of the sequenced dots found in braille or musical notes arranged upon a score. For music is important to this notion of variation upon a theme.

As well as touch there is also a strong sense of the body itself, as scale and proportion augment and contract dependent on their predestined environment. In the past Randall-Page has produced monumental public art works such as Give and Take or Green Fuse, and then there are the architectural interventions such as the colossal Seed imbedded in the architectural fabric of the Eden Project’s latticed canopy. Yet it is his ‘domestically’ proportioned works, such as the series Inside Out, experienced within the confines of the gallery space, that confront us so squarely with our own corporeality. Stood before their hulking mass you could reach out and attempt to wrap your arms around them as if to perform a sort of ceremonial act of recognition.

These bronze works are created from the inside-out, cast from stone and then dug out and into as curved domes are scooped from the mould. In their stoic solidity they still possess reminders of their stone-past. And it is here again that we are stretched back in time playing dot-to-dot between nature’s unravelling patterns and forms. References have been made in the past to ancient monument and architecture, likening the eternal nature of Randall-Page’s use of stone to that of the Pyramids, the Parthenon or Stonehenge.14 Yet, for all the importance of materiality – stone, clay, ink and pencil – they are simply vehicles for his essential subject: nature.

A keen and much documented interest in the Scottish zoologist D’Arcy Thompson offers much by way of explanation for Randall-Page’s understanding of the world around him.15 Expanding on the Darwinian theory of natural selection, Thompson introduces a new notion of adaptation, linking organic and living entities together through the principle of underlying and pervasive patterns and forms that exist throughout. Adapting, mutating and re-inventing, these structures return again and again creating a ‘dance between geometry and organism’.16

Linked to this notion of archetypal patterns is that of symmetry, another recurring feature throughout Randall-Page’s work. It can be seen in the enormous span of the wall-mounted Wing based on a microscopic study of a grasshopper wing. The faded russet of terracotta tiles seemingly balance precariously on the wall, yet their dried-out, baked surfaces, tired and worn, suggest a heaviness that negates any hope of flight. Inspired simultaneously by Euclidean geometry and Roschbach’s inkblot theory these symmetrical works have been compared to the cross section of a brain scan.17 The deeply gouged channels between each piece could also bear more than a passing resemblance to the white expanses between the irregular passageways of his large ink drawings.

Here though, in the bright light of the gallery, it most immediately resembles a complex jigsaw laid out and ready to be pieced back together (though perhaps this is an unavoidable result of witnessing its installation). However, this notion of ‘putting back together’, or joining the dots, can be seen throughout Randall-Page’s work. Whether carving or casting, tipping and tilting, adding or subtracting material, there is an underlying aim to unravel, uncoil, adapt and play, yet without losing sight of nature’s template.

Graft, grapple, strain, contort, mould, drill, chisel, shape and shorn. Layer, pattern, fold, twist and turn. These are not works that appear from nowhere. Upon and beneath the surface of each work is the evidence of human-hands, time present and time past. There is the earth and the sky, the movement upwards, taking flight, and the drilling down, through soil and stone – and then between the water, flowing.

Essay Extract:Drawing on, drawing through, drawing out, and beyond: drawings contain a history and a future. They are always incomplete, ‘emerging but never quite becoming’, transparent, democratic, crossing spatial and theoretical boundaries, creating signposts that act as intersections between diverse disciplines, crossing the centuries. Drawing allows us to analyse, record, map, mark and form, making the abstract legible, and the legible oblique: its history inscribed with legibility as it skirts around the boundaries of text and image. It can be either a representation, or an expression, creating shadows and memories, marks and imprints, traces in space.

]]>https://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/drawing-through-exhibition-essay-2015/feed/08639462303_c884c41e86_bhereisartIf You Go Down to the Woods Todayhttps://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-today-exhibition-essay-2014/
https://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-today-exhibition-essay-2014/#respondSun, 11 Jan 2015 18:04:35 +0000http://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/?p=122Exhibition essay produced for Arboretum: The Art of Trees – The Arborealists and other Artists, at RWA, 2014. The essay can be downloaded as a PDF here here.

Whether painted in-situ within quiet parklands; battling the wind upon blustering cliff tops, or in the artist’s studio, perceived through the filters of memory, imagination or the photographic frame, almost all the works here are haunted by ghosts – from Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) to Paul Nash (1889-1946) – acknowledging the enduring presence of the tree in art.

The passing of time is highlighted in the loyal depiction of one solitary Lime Tree followed by John Blandy over a series of months, and through Celia de Serra’s fallen heroes, “the last remaining sentries”, still guarding the ground after twenty-five long years. Awareness of trees’ stoic presence begins in childhood, where ‘the woods are lovely, dark and deep’, harbouring secret paths and woodland shelters. Dan Hays recalls his own youth, remembering how “the boughs of the ‘swinging tree’ swayed like a bucking bronco. Materials for bows and arrows were researched and tested. Dens were constructed.” Kurt Jackson’s scored and scratched depictions of Skewjack in West Cornwall and the rich forest interior of Ashcombe in Bath are also intricately layered with childhood memories of summers spent exploring the squirrel and jay filled oak woodlands of Hertfordshire.

Yet, this notion of trees and woodland as a place of safety – an arbour for innocence – is often tainted by fear and foreboding: the fairytale boughs and branches become the haunting arms of nightmares. Here, trees are caught between fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, the past and the present: trees act as thresholds, and woods and forests are liminal spaces. In Lisa Wright’s shadowy apparition a naked child lingers at the stump of a tree, stuck between pre- pubescence and adolescence, from a series fittingly titled Twilight.

Trees also act as an anchor, physically grounding us in time and space, as their gnarled roots spread and tangle, intermingling with the ground beneath. Fiona Hingston reminds us of this with her muted forest tapestry which has been dragged from the earth in soil and charcoal. In Arboretum this specificity of medium also takes on a new significance highlighted by the inclusion of preparatory studies, materials and tools. It emphasises the constant reference to layers and patterning throughout the work, such as Hannah Maybank’s textured surfaces constructed of delicate layers of paint over latex, built up in stratum like the coiled concentric circles that lie beneath the brittle bark of a tree. These seductive layers of peeling paint are suggestive of a vast history entombed beneath “wrapping the picture up to produce its own rings of a tree”.

This ‘inner life’ of trees, so often exposed by the human hand, draws attention to mans’ relationship with these ancient sentinels, intertwining the romantic tradition in art alongside current ecological issues. Julian Perry’s Three Pollards portrays experimental forestry work that reprises the practice of pollarding, which ended with the coding of the forest as a public space in 1878. Other traces of man’s influence exist in Jemma Appleby’s disquieting forest landscape, which is interrupted by Usonian-inspired architecture, creating an image of somewhere removed – an otherworldly landscape that cannot exist.

From the pastoral tradition to 1930s futurism, over centuries the tree has come to represent a symbol of the British landscape and our national character – inscribed with human qualities, they are anthropomorphised to create a metaphor for man. Arboretum presents these treescapes, whether real, remembered or imagined, combining folklore and fairytale, fact and fiction, past and present. Here, amidst the arboreal arms of history, time passes, yet trees remain, proud as a sentinel, our ancient protectors.

1 Craven, Tim, ‘A Short and selective survey of the tree in (mainly British) art history’ in Under the Greenwood: Picturing the British Tree from Constable to Kurt Jackson (Bristol: Sansom and Co, 2013), page 12

]]>https://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-today-exhibition-essay-2014/feed/015586727513_644449d6d3_ohereisartThe Poetics of Spacehttps://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/the-poetics-of-space-exhibition-essay-2014/
https://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/2015/01/11/the-poetics-of-space-exhibition-essay-2014/#respondSun, 11 Jan 2015 18:03:54 +0000http://gemmabracewriting.wordpress.com/?p=120Curatorial response essay commissioned for Back From the Front, Ed. Dr Hazel Brown. Published in conjunction with the exhibition programme Back From the Front at the RWA, 2014, which included the exhibitions Shock and Awe, Brothers in Art: John and Paul Nash, Re-membering I and Re-membering II. A link to the E-book is available here pages 187-191.

‘The Poetics of Space’ – A reflection on Art and Memory in Back From The Front

What is a space for remembering? Should it be filled with objects that hint and tease, coaxing us with a series of incremental clues? Or should it confront us with its immediacy, a bolt of emotion that courses through us like an unwelcome visitor?

There is always a period of quiet transformation when the gallery is in transition, the empty white cube awaiting its next adventure caught between two worlds. In July 2014 this change was marked by the departure of The Power of the Sea – which focused on nature’s power – to Back From The Front – concentrating on the influence of mankind – engaging the galleries in an act of commemoration.

Back From The Front at the RWA encompassed a number of exhibitions staged under one roof creating a temporary memorial inscribed with the names of numerous conflicts. Upstairs in the main galleries two very different spaces emerged. One seemingly muted, poetic, memories layered beneath painted shadows and reflections in the landscape, and the other stark, often confrontational, shocking. Their installation was simultaneous: two exhibitions, over twenty artists, some long dead, the majority alive, and many on-site physically creating, placing and adjusting their own private memorial within which individual and collective memories could reside.

Brothers in Art asked us ‘how is landscape remembered’ and ‘how do we remember through art’ whereas Shock and Awe had to create its own landscape, its own ‘space’ for remembering. As a visual spectacle Brothers in Art emerged slowly. It was linear, two-dimensional, driven by a necessary chronological narrative to create a panoramic vision of the English countryside, both imagined and real. In contrast the sheer scale and physicality emerging next door achieved a sense of transformation almost immediately with the arrival on-site of Tim Shaw’s 17feet high sculpture Casting A Dark Democracy. The cavernous shell of its torso fabricated in steel, barbed wire and taut black polythene was lifted using an engineered pulley system where it hung headless, suspended before inching into place. The attachment of the outstretched arms introduced a new sense of theatre, but it was the final careful positioning of the cloaked head that ushered in a corporeal response inspiring both shock and awe. To borrow De Certeau’s notion of space as a practiced place, the gallery had spoken.

This sense of creating new ‘spaces’ continued throughout the installation. For Katie Davies’ film The Separation Line a blacked-out screening box was built to specific dimensions, creating a space in which the distance between viewer and screen replicates the exact width of the road at Royal Wootton Bassett where it was filmed. Davies was keen to create a “space for contemplation” that places the viewer in direct eye line with the mourners on screen. By building the screen at floor level viewers feet were also compelled into position, mimicking the posture of those onscreen. Just as the towering enormity of Shaw’s sculpture instils an underlying awareness of one’s own body, here Davies achieves a similar sensory reaction with the stifling claustrophobia of the black box which forces the viewer to stand uncomfortably in the space , separate and apart yet together.

These physical interventions and decisions were made throughout the planning and installation process. A freestanding white wall was positioned directly within the galleries main doors blocking the visitors’ initial view of the space and thus creating a defined moment of confrontation on entering, inviting both shock and awe. The opposing side of the wall was transformed with the aid of a carefully measured step establishing a pedestal upon which Paul Laidler’s digitally printed wreath was placed to create a new ‘monument’. The painted shadow behind the acrylic sheet introduced a new element to the work. Depending on the viewer’s position it was now both transparent and opaque, visible and invisible.

The physical relationship of viewer to work also took on a strange life in the production of a series of display plinths within which to show work by a number of the enamellists, makers and jewellers that curator (and exhibiting artist) Elizabeth Turrell RWA had commissioned. These eight grey plinths with sunken shelves and clear perspex lids were originally envisaged to stand in two uniform rows but were later moved to sit in smaller uneven groups. Before this, in their sullen uniformity, they were suggestive of a macabre line of coffins – a consequence of an exhibition and subject matter that so strongly reminds us of our own mortality. Similarly the use of anatomical language seemed to infiltrate the descriptions of the work with Rolf Lindner’s found enamel sheet riddled with bullet holes described as “broken skin”.

It was this very physicality, and more importantly the materiality, of both Shock and Awe and Re-membering I and Re-membering II that seemed to encourage the act of remembering. From the industrial barbarism of Shaw’s centrepiece to the domestic nature of Hanne Rysgaard’s ceramics in Under An English Heaven, the diverse use of medium and materials took on greater significance in terms of the relationship between art and memory, underscoring each work with an additional layer of meaning. Perhaps most prevalent has been the use of photography. As a medium it is inherently linked to the notion of absence, presenting ghostly traces of the past. It is always the ‘that has been’ . Yet materiality is not just linked to the ephemerality of photography. It is also seen in Michael Brennand-Wood’s monotone metal medals in which toy plastic soldiers are embalmed in the thick gloop of colourful paint, struggling to escape like soldiers caught in the mud and mire of the trenches. Or Stephen Hurst’s bronze sculptures cast from found objects, rough, textured and unpolished as if they too have been dragged from the ground, leaden with history. Jill Gibbon’s ‘posters’ pinned to the wall point at their own reproducibility, drawing attention to the glitzy marketing attached to the events which she is documenting, whereas Xavier Pick’s exquisitely printed pages from well-travelled sketchbooks are given a greater significance, each page poignantly containing its own metanarrative, each fragment given a new autonomy and thus importance.

From the material nature of each work to the architectural staging of the exhibition materiality was present throughout. The space created was (like a memory theatre) embedded with prompts and clues, and each medium was inscribed with its own notion of memory and remembering: visibility v invisibility, opacity v transparency, ephemerality v permanence, reality v illusion. The immense physicality of war and conflict seemed to demand this response, insisting on its own ‘pedestal’. It has often been suggested that war heightens our relationship to the physical objects and materials that surround us and Back From The Front in all its incarnations seems to physically impress this upon us. What is a space for remembering? Here, in Back From The Front it is one guided by the objects that sit within it, some that confront, some that speak with quiet authority and others that gently whisper: lest we forget.